(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the system management of a blade server.
(2) Description of the Related Art
There is known a blade server system having a plurality of blades each including components required to provide a server, e.g., a CPU, a hard disk, etc. mounted on a single board, the blades being housed in a chassis (blade housing unit). The chassis also accommodates therein a power supply unit and a cooling fan that are required to operate the housed blades, and a network switch for making it possible to perform data communications between the blades. Usually, the chassis housing the blades is placed in a housing.
For performing the system management of the blade server system, there has been known a process using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) as disclosed in Japanese laid-open patent publication No. 2004-213651. According to the system management using the SNMP, the network between the blades in the chassis and between different chassis is monitored to manage the configurations of devices, i.e., the blades, management modules, etc., which are connected to the network.
According to the conventional system management using the SNMP, however, since the configurational information of the devices is managed individually by the respective devices, but not uniformly by the system in its entirety, the management of the system configurations is complex. In addition, if a device needs to be replaced due to the occurrence of a fault, then as the faulty device carries its configurational information, the configurational information cannot easily be taken over.